How Mutares Uses Shibumi to Accelerate Business Transformations
Shibumi provides insights across millions of Euros of investment, shortening time to ROl
Company Name:
Mutares SE & Co. KGaA
Industry:
Private Equity
Location:
Munich, Germany
Company Size:
€4.72 billion in annual revenue
Business Impact:
- Reduced holding periods
- Faster return on investment
- Accelerated implementation of transformations
Customer Overview
Mutares is a large European holding company specializing in the acquisition of companies in turnaround situations.
Goal
Standardize Approach to Transformation Across a Global Portfolio
Founded in 2008, Mutares is a leading European holding company that has acquired numerous companies in turnaround situations, restructuring them and transforming operations so they can profitably meet their missions. Mutares has continued to grow its portfolio with focused investments in automotive, engineering & technology, goods & services, and retail & food.
“As we grew, we needed one common platform to manage the scale of our investments and how to track their turnaround progress,,” said James Bishop, Associate Director & Deputy Head of Mutares’ Transformation Management Practice.
Across acquisitions and within Mutares itself, data was routinely handled in Excel, creating margins for error and obscuring crucial insights. This siloed approach led to missed opportunities, since historical data wasn’t factored into decision-making. Planning, tracking, and prioritizing initiatives across the firm’s many investments suffered due to the unnecessary complexity of multiple approaches and models and hundreds of spreadsheets.
Solution
Use Shibumi to Establish Real-Time Performance Visibility
Across geographic regions, investment sectors, and individual holdings, Mutares deployed Shibumi to help capture, consolidate, and report on data through dashboards updated in real time.
Shibumi tracks progress for each investment and has also been introduced at the companies under Mutares’ guidance. With individual businesses inputting relevant data, Mutares is also able to create a comprehensive, consistent dataset to track key KPIs at every level of its operations. “Shibumi is now the expectation; it’s the standard,” Bishop said. “We use Shibumi to track all of our information.”
“With Shibumi, we can deliver transformation faster. Since we’ve implemented Shibumi, we tend to have good turnaround outcomes…It’s helped us standardize our approach. We don’t have to start from scratch—we can see a clear transformation path.”
JAMES BISHOP, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR & DEPUTY HEAD OF TRANSFORMATION MANAGEMENT PRACTICE
With Shibumi, Mutares can link performance data to financials, compare actuals to targets, and make strategic decisions based on trustworthy and complete data. Shibumi’s dashboarding also empowers Mutares’ executive leadership to see performance at a glance in a single dashboard. “There’s massive value in having everything rolled up in one view,” Bishop said. “Shibumi really brings everything together for us. We know if we’re tracking against plan or not.”
Results
Shibumi Standardizes Best Practices That Accelerate Return on Investment
With Shibumi integrated at every level, Mutares benefits from better data quality across investment lifecycles and gains insight from historical forecast data that informs how it manages companies in its portfolio. The ability to capture and analyze key information drives better outcomes on accelerated timelines
“With Shibumi, we can deliver transformation faster,” Bishop shared. “And we now have best practice learnings. Since we’ve implemented Shibumi, we have improved our turnaround outcomes. During this period of growth, as we encounter new challenges, we can find evidence of what has worked in the past in similar use cases. It’s helped us standardize our approach. We don’t have to start from scratch—we can see a clear transformation path.”
Reducing complexity and making data available and digestible has enhanced all aspects of Mutares’ work— from acquisitions and consulting to transformation and sale. “That transparency is good for business,” Bishop said. “It sounds simple, but it’s not. It’s a massive achievement.”
